Boeing, which makes the F15-E Strike Eagle jet, funded travel for at least 37 Pentagon officials between 1998 and 2007. (Air Force photo)

The drudgery of military life can be difficult to overcome at times, and so it can be helpful to decamp to new and exotic locations to break the routine. And when travel opportunities are work-related, it can take an abstemious person to resist temptation. An Army major and Walter Reed Army Medical Center doctor named Jerome Buller understandably left the dreariness of late February in Washington in 2006 for a meeting on female urology in the Bahamas, held in the city of Freeport, where the weather hovers around the high 70s that time of year.

Illustration by: Matt Mahurin

The cost for Buller’s five-day Bahamanian meeting, according to a trove of Pentagon travel documents obtained by the Center for Public Integrity, was $2,699. The bill, however, was footed by the Henry M. Jackson Foundation, a non-profit that supports advancements in military medicine and receives funding from, among other sources, the Defense Department. Walter Reed’s communications department did not respond for comment. Everything about both Buller’s trip and the Foundation’s sponsorship of his travel is entirely legal, as a recent Pentagon memorandum on travel benefits affirms, and it would be hard to find some kind of quid pro quo at a medical conference. But the trip is an example of the hand-in-glove relationship between private organizations that do business with the Department of Defense and the department’s employees — where, to the concern of watchdog organizations, private interests frequently open their wallets to foot the travel costs of Pentagon officials, uniformed officers and department-funded civilians in order to maintain good relationships with the Pentagon.

Boeing, for instance, is one of the largest of all U.S. defense contractors, earning billions annually from a myriad of Pentagon contracts. According to the Center for Public Integrity’s newly created online database of Pentagon travel documents, Boeing paid for at least 37 officials’ travel expenses to various locations between 1998 and 2007, including a trip by seven enlisted airmen to the 2002 Asian Aerospace 2002 Airshow in Singapore. The total cost of the trip: $12,278. Boeing produces numerous aircraft for the Air Force, including the F-15E Strike Eagle and, along with Lockheed Martin, the F-22 fighter jet that Defense Secretary Robert Gates recently canceled.

“They’re sowing seeds,” said defense reform advocate Winslow Wheeler of the Center for Defense Information of contractors who foot the bill for junior officers’ and enlisted men and women’s travel. “Some of these lieutenants and captains will be colonels and above, and they want to make sure they’ve got their hands in their pockets.”

The permissible rules also extend to foreign governments engaged in defense-based diplomacy. The Saudi Ministry of Defense and Aviation, for instance, spent $9,162 to send an Army lieutenant colonel on a training trip to four locations within the U.S. in late 2005. The Chinese Ministry of Defense paid $7,650 in course expenses for a U.S. Navy captain to attend the 2001 Symposium on Asia-Pacific Security in Beijing.

A 2008 memorandum, prepared by the Standards of Conduct Office within the Pentagon’s Office of General Counsel, places few restrictions on trips Defense Department employees can accept from outside organizations. According to the memorandum, a “travel-approving authority” must affirm that “payment is for attendance at a meeting, conference, seminar, speaking engagement, symposium, training course, or receipt of an award or honorary degree related to official duties.” Payment can’t be accepted for an event in which “the primary purpose is marketing the non-Federal source’s products or services.” The approving authority has to certify that “a reasonable person with knowledge of all the relevant facts” would not be able to use the travel payment “to question the integrity of the Government’s programs or operations.” Cash is not an acceptable form of payment.

Ethics rules restricting congressional travel paid for by lobbyists — or organizations employing lobbyists, such as Boeing — are significantly more cumbersome. The Washington Independent’s Mike Lillis reports here on the discrepancies between congressional and Pentagon travel rules. Travel scandals ensnared several prominent members of Congress during the past decade, including former House Republican leader Tom DeLay (R-Texas).

But the rules for Pentagon travel payments haven’t received the same scrutiny. “The idea is that if you’re a member of the executive branch you aren’t pulling the purse stings,” said Laura Peterson, a national security investigator for Taxpayers for Common Sense. “You’re in a position to draw up strategy and request money, therefore you should be more immune from outside influence. But I don’t think that’s borne out in reality.” Members of the military services at senior levels routinely press members of Congress to draw up budgets that suit the services’ interests and desires, particularly when it comes to military procurement, which is a multi-billion dollar annual industry. “Anyone trying to influence the spending process will try to influence every step of the process, and that includes [influencing] the Pentagon,” Peterson continued.

Several prominent military officers and civilian officials have benefited from the permissibility of Pentagon travel rules. Adm. James Stavridis, recently tapped to become NATO Supreme Allied Commander, had the $2,100 tab picked up by Milbank & Tweed for delivering a speech at the financial services law firm’s February 2007 partners meeting. The Chinese government spent $3,600 so Adm. Dennis Blair could tour China for a week in 2001 when the Obama administration’s director of national intelligence led U.S. Pacific Command. The Association for Enterprise Integration, which boosts tech-based partnerships between industry and government, paid $550 in April 2004 so the then-head of U.S. Joint Forces Command, Adm. Edmund Giambastiani, could attend a Vienna, Va., conference on tech-enhanced warfare.

“Capitol Hill is notorious for its lax rules, and the Pentagon isn’t even using that standard,” said Wheeler of the Center for Defense Information, a former longtime congressional staffer. “Does it not bother Pentagon managers that future field-grade officers are being transported by defense manufacturers? You’d think in a strictly ethical system that would be against the rules.”

The Pentagon (Department of Defense photo)

In 2007, after passing legislation to rein in the schmoozy junkets that allowed lobbyists to buy face time with lawmakers, congressional leaders from all political walks applauded their effort as a long stride toward limiting the influence of moneyed interests over Washington policymakers.

“We have promised the highest ethical standard,” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said at the time, “and we will deliver it, in an open and honest government.”

Illustration by: Matt Mahurin

She didn’t mention that the restrictions targeted members of Congress and their staffs almost exclusively.

Nearly two years later, a new study reveals that travel by executive branch officials might merit similar scrutiny. From 1998 through 2007, Pentagon officials have been treated to at least 22,000 worldwide trips, worth at least $26 million, funded by outside groups like corporations and foreign governments, many of which have contracts or other interests before the agency, according to the study released Wednesday by the Center for Public Integrity and Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism. Such junkets are legal as long as internal screeners grant prior approval, but government watchdog groups say there’s plenty of room for conflicts of interest.

Indeed, the analysts found cases where pharmaceutical giants treated Pentagon doctors and pharmacists to overseas trips totaling thousands of dollars each, including a $7,800 visit to Paris. (Meanwhile, pharmaceutical spending by the Department of Defense jumped nearly 300 percent, to $6 billion a year, between 2000 and 2006.) In another case, a Saudi prince picked up the $24,000 tab for a visit from Richard Millies, deputy director of the Defense Security Cooperation Agency, and his wife. Milles just happened to run the program that sells weapon systems to foreign governments, the report found. (Meanwhile, Saudi Arabia accounted for roughly $4.4 billion in such purchases between 2003 and 2006 alone, according to the Congressional Research Service.)

Government watchdog groups are quick to point out that the spending isn’t meant to be charity. “There’s a business reason for providing these trips to officials,” said Robert M. Stern, president of the Center for Governmental Studies, a Los Angeles-based non-profit research group.

The Defense Department did not respond to requests for comment Tuesday.

It wasn’t supposed to be this way. Confronted with the Jack Abramoff scandal — as well as a similar CPI-Medill study detailing congressional travel trends — lawmakers took steps in 2007 to restrict lobbyist- and corporate- funded junkets. Those efforts culminated in the passage of a bill prohibiting trips of longer than one day for any organization employing a lobbyist and banning lobbyists from going along. The new law also prevents moneyed interests from shuttling lawmakers around on corporate jets and requires congressional ethics panels to OK trips 30 days in advance. Additionally, the law requires that all trips be disclosed online.

By contrast, federal rules allow outsiders to fund trips and other expenses for executive branch employees if internal screeners give prior approval. The rules indicate that the travel must be related to the employee’s normal task and not represent a conflict of interest. The records are held, in paper form, by the U.S. Office of Government Ethics.

Craig Holman, legislative representative for Public Citizen’s Congress Watch, said the difference between the limits on congressional travel and those affecting executive branch officials represents “a gaping chasm.” The federal rules might sound good on the surface, he argued, but the sheer number of internal ethics officers — some hired by political appointees — make oversight of the process almost impossible. In one case, a high-level Interior Department official under the Bush administration employed his girlfriend as his ethics officer, he added.

In another high-profile case, Nancy Nord, the acting chairman of the United States Consumer Product Safety Commission, was found to have taken expensive trips to China, Spain and San Francisco on the tab of some of the same retail manufacturers she’s now charged with regulating. Nord’s term expires in October 2012.

“This is the system of ethics we’ve got in the executive branch,” Holman said.

Holman, along with sources on Capitol Hill, said that any changes to the travel procedures for executive branch officials will likely originate with the Obama administration. The White House on Wednesday did not return a call for comment.

How soon that change occurs could have a significant effect on federal spending. Stern said the potential conflicts of interest between White House officials and special interests are potentially more glaring than those between Congress and lobbyists. “In a sense they’re even more important, because they’re the ones who make the decisions about where the money goes,” Stern said of the executive branch officials. “It’s clearly as important — and maybe more important — because no one’s watching.”

Many watchdogs are hoping that Wednesday’s report could be precisely the spark that sets the process of reform in motion. “It usually takes embarrassment,” Stern said, “before these things are done.”